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Female fans normally know more facts about what’s going on than men do anyway. I’d say they’re a more intelligent fan on top of that. They normally know more about what we’ve done than we know about what we’ve done. --- Tony Stewart

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There are female fans who take apart engines and will take you apart if you have a problem with that; who are drawn to the danger and mystery of the sport; who watch races on TV to witness pure passion and unscripted emotion; who love the camaraderie of these family-friendly festivals; who feel the nervous anxiety of the lip-biting wives atop the pit boxes. --- Andrew Giangola “The Weekend Starts on Wednesday”

KANNAPOLIS, N.C., (April 17, 2013) – Tony Stewart’s
success in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series is well known. Three Sprint Cup
championships. Forty-seven Sprint Cup victories. Fourteen Sprint Cup
poles. One hundred and seventy four top-fives and 283 top-10s in 507 career Sprint Cup starts, with a total of 12,538 laps led.

Now in his 40s, Stewart’s ability to maintain that level of success
comes from an old-school mentality that appears new school in an age of
specialization.

In an era where NASCAR drivers race in NASCAR, IZOD IndyCar Series drivers race in IndyCar, sports-car
drivers race in sports cars, Stewart races nearly everything,
everywhere. After wheeling his No. 14 Bass Pro Shops/Mobil 1 Chevrolet
SS for Stewart-Haas Racing around the tracks that dot the 38-race Sprint
Cup schedule, Stewart is prone
to jump in his jet and find a race at Somewhere Speedway, U.S.A. and
wheel a high-horsepower winged Sprint Car around dirt bullrings from
upstate New York to inland California and everywhere in between.

Stewart’s roots are in dirt-track racing, and he’s always kept his
hands dirty. He’s been a mainstay in grassroots motorsports despite
moving up the racing ladder from USAC to IndyCar and then NASCAR in the
late 90s. But Stewart’s extra-curricular racing activities ramped up in
2011, with a strong slate of Sprint Car races that gave him the
confidence to run in the elite World of Outlaws (WoO) STP Sprint Car Series.

In 2011, Stewart won his first WoO race on July 27 at Ohsweken
Speedway in Ontario, Canada. Coincidentally, 2011 was the year Stewart
won his third Sprint Cup championship
during an epic run in the 10-race Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup where
Stewart won five races to take the title in a tiebreaker over Carl
Edwards.

More Sprint Car races were added to the docket in 2012, where Stewart
ran approximately 90 total races, a figure that includes the 38 races
he ran in the Sprint Cup Series. Stewart has slightly upped the ante in
2013 with 100 races on his schedule.

One of the more recent extra-curricular races came April 6 at
Selinsgrove (Pa.) Speedway. After Stewart finished final practice at
Martinsville (Va.) Speedway, he flew from Virginia to Pennsylvania to
compete in the Empire Super Sprint (ESS) 360 Winged Sprint Car race. All
Stewart did was set a new track qualifying record (17.168 seconds at
111.053 mph) before winning his eight-lap heat race and then his 30-lap
feature – at a track Stewart had never visited before. Nine hours later
he was making his hospitality rounds for his sponsors at Martinsville
before attending the mandatory driver’s meeting.

And following a disappointing 21st-place finish last Saturday night
in the NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth,
Stewart hit the reset button by racing his winged Sprint Car at
Susquehanna Speedway Park in York Haven, Pa. At the track’s fourth annual Sprint Car Spring Classic, Stewart finished 10th.

Stewart will perform this unique bit of double duty again this
weekend when the Sprint Cup Series comes to Kansas Speedway in Kansas
City, Kan. While Stewart’s day job
will consist of practicing and qualifying his Bass Pro Shops/Mobil 1
Chevy on Friday at the 1.5-mile oval, upon completion of those duties,
Stewart will depart for Paducah, Ky., where he’ll compete in the WoO
feature at Paducah International Raceway, a track Stewart co-owns with
Bob Sargent and Ken Schrader. There, he’ll look to score his fourth
career WoO feature victory.

It will provide fun for Stewart, but also valuable experience that
he’ll carry back to Kansas, all of which will make Stewart better at a
track where he’s already good. Really good.

In 14 career Sprint Cup starts at Kansas, Stewart has two wins, six
top-fives, nine top-10s and has led 152 laps. He’s one of only four
drivers who have won more than once at Kansas, the others being Jimmie
Johnson, Jeff Gordon and Greg Biffle. No driver has won three Sprint Cup
races at Kansas. But with plenty of Sprint Car experience, Stewart
could stand out by getting a third Kansas win come Sunday’s STP 400.

When you have the kind of success that you had at Selinsgrove
Speedway, what does it do for you? How does it impact what you’re doing
in NASCAR?

“It makes me feel good, especially at a weekend like we had at
Martinsville, which was a tough weekend for us. We just never could find
what the car liked and what it was really wanting. And it’s nights like
Saturday night when you have a good night – a perfect night, really. We
broke the track record, won our heat and won the main, and we had to do
it from the back. That’s the perfect kind of night. It gave me balance
that weekend. Saturday when we left Martinsville, we kind of knew we
were in trouble for Sunday, but instead of being in the bus all night
and worrying about it and fretting over it, I went and raced and won and
came back to the track excited. I came to the driver’s meeting the next
morning excited and got in the racecar excited. A lot of times, a good
night of racing the night before gives you a lot of momentum going into
the next day.”

To the layperson, it’s hard to understand why you would jet
off from a Sprint Cup venue on a Friday or Saturday night to go run a
dirt track somewhere. Explain why you do it.

“It’s like hitting a reset button for me. It’s a lot of effort, a lot
of money and a lot of time involved to do all this, but it’s worth it.
It’s worthwhile because it’s something not everybody can do. I’m in a
fortunate position where I have the resources to do it, but I also don’t
have a wife and children. I have a German Shepherd who doesn’t care
where we go, he’s just happy to go with us. I have the flexibility a lot
of these other drivers don’t. But even if they had the time, I’m not
sure they’d want to go run 70 dirt races on top of a 38-race Cup
schedule. It’s just what I enjoy. It’s my release. I’m a very
competitive person. I like my downtime, but I like being busy on the
weekends. I enjoy being able to go run dirt races and Cup races. Being
busy with all of that keeps me sharp. I ran the most dirt races I ever
ran last year since I’ve been a Cup driver with 46, and with that I
probably had one of the most fun years of my life even though it wasn’t
my best year in Cup. But the nine races we won in the Sprint Car helped
balance that out. It’s a balancing act for me. That’s what I’m into.
Other people are into golf, but
going racing on Friday night and Saturday night and during the week is
my golf. Until I can’t do it anymore, this is what I want to do.”

You’ve said that running Sprint Cars on dirt makes you sharper. How does it apply to what you’re doing in NASCAR?

“I think it helps on the restarts, for sure. I’m definitely more
aggressive on the restarts. In Sprint Car racing, you have to get a lot
done at the start and on restarts, and I think that part has really been
a positive and really been a help in making me more aggressive. Even
though Cup races are much longer races, being able to get guys while
they’re getting up to speed or while their tires are building pressure,
that more aggressive attitude helps me on the restarts because I can
pick up an extra spot here and there.”

You’re going to end up running nearly 100 races this year, more than half of which will be in a Sprint Car on dirt. Why so many?

“It’s something I’ve been doing a lot this year, but the winged Sprint
Cars probably caught me off guard the most. You’re driving a car that
with the driver weighs 1,450 pounds and has 925 horsepower. It has the
big wing on top of it. Anything you run that has a wing, it has so much
downforce it definitely keeps you on your toes.

“When I was running Indy cars, you had to hit your marks. You had to
be so precise on hitting the same spot every time. You find that same
trend with the dirt cars, but the track changes throughout the night.
You add a cushion to it, then you start throwing other variables in
there that you’re not used to. That’s probably been the hardest thing
for me, but that’s also what has made it such fun for me.”

What is the competition on dirt like these days compared to when you raced on dirt regularly in the 1980s and 1990s?

“When I came up through the USAC ranks, I didn’t run any winged
Sprint Car stuff. It was a different chapter, to be honest. I never was
really involved in the winged Sprint Car side until after I had started
with Joe Gibbs Racing. We started our first World of Outlaws team in
2001 with Danny Lasoski, and it hasn’t been until the last couple of
years that I started running the winged Sprint Car a lot. Man, I’m
telling you, the competition is tough. You’ve got guys like Kyle Larson
and Donny Schatz and Steve Kinser, Sammy Swindell – you’ve got the same
guys that have always been good, but you’ve got a young group of guys
like Larson. The competition is as tough in Sprint Car racing as it has
ever been. There are more teams than ever that have been able to go out
each week and put together a good night.”

This will be the second race since Kansas was repaved. How much will the track have changed since last fall?

“It will have changed some just due to weather. The thing with the
track last fall is that it was so smooth – even the transitions were
smooth. We knew going in that it would have a ton of grip and a ton of
speed, but it was smoother than most highways you go down. The key is
getting more rubber on the racetrack. The more rubber that gets
transferred, the better the racing surface is. It was better by the end
of the race weekend last year and it will keep getting better the more
laps we run.”

What is the biggest challenge to overcome during the first part of this new season?

“I think just learning the new car and finding the combination. We’re
basically starting from scratch. There are some things that you take
away from what we did last year, but anytime you have a major change in
the bodystyle like we have this year and the rules changes that we’re
having, that’s the No. 1 obstacle – trying to figure out what this car
likes and dislikes so it gives you a direction.”